Conveyor Belt Ocean Current Model Flawed

I do not know about you, but how would you like to walk into your office on Monday morning and be told that the core input frame for climate modeling might be rubbish. That means hundreds of lifetimes of programming effort are a giant case of garbage in garbage out.

This is the type of massive design flaw that will not get fixed by a fudge here and a fudge there. Right now you need a massive input of data to properly reconstruct what is really happening because you have just found out that the nice satisfying model that you have relied n for decades is not holding up so well.

In fairness, of course, this is new data and it is the first attempt to try it on. It may sort itself out to look a lot like the old picture that common sense tells us it should. That we should be engaged in deep flow measurement around the globe is now becoming the priority it should have been all along.

We need an accurate three dimensional map of flows in the deep ocean. This will take instrumented cables and a recovery ship working for years as it seems likely that you would get one measurement run each day however it is made to happen.

Maybe it is time to design solid state sensor kits that are merely taped to the cable every few fathoms.

Conveyor Belt Model Broken
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Sat, 05/16/2009 - 14:06

http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/conveyor-belt-model-broken
http://theresilientearth.com/files/images/Great_Ocean_Conveyor-ipcc.jpg

News has come that the famed ocean conveyor belt, subject of countless TV documentaries and science lessons, is not as simple as scientists believed. The 50 year old model of global ocean circulation that predicts a deep Atlantic counter current below the Gulf Stream has been called into question by an armada of drifting subsurface sensors. As shocking as this news is to oceanographers it is even worse for climate modelers—it means that all the current climate prediction models are significantly wrong.

It is known by many names: the meridional overturning current (MOC), the thermohaline circulation (THC), and, popularly, the great ocean conveyor belt. It has been the subject of study by oceanographers for half a century and is known to be a fundamentally important part of earthly climate regulation. It is the primary mechanism for transferring heat from the tropics to higher latitudes, the proximate reason that the occasional palm tree grows on the south coast of England. Until now, scientists thought they had a pretty good handle on how the current flows, the mechanisms that drive the circulation and affect climate world wide.

A new report by Amy Bower of Wood’s Hole and Susan Lozier of Duke University et al., to be published in a forthcoming issue of Nature, has rocked the climate community's complacency. A bevy of subsurface RAFOS floats, drifting 2200 – 4900 feet (700 – 1500 m) deep, have shown several fundamental

assumptions about the structure of the current to be wrong. RAFOS floats (SOFAR spelled backward) are floating instruments designed to move with the water and track the water's movements. It seems that 75% of the RAFOS floats escaped the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) and drifted into open ocean. Only 8% of the RAFOS floats followed the DWBC conveyor belt current, according to the Nature report.

This confirms suspicions that that first began surfacing in the 1990’s, that things were not quite as neat and simple as oceanographers had thought. Earlier observations had led to the widely held view that the DWBC is the dominant pathway for the export of cold Labrador Sea Water (LSW) from its formation site in the northern North Atlantic towards the Equator. The new findings indicate that instead of the single, orderly current flow previously envisioned that the conveyor belt is actually comprised of many slower, more variable and possibly wandering eddies in the interior ocean. Quoting from the report:

Here we show that most of the recently ventilated LSW entering the subtropics follows interior, not DWBC, pathways. The interior pathways are revealed by trajectories of subsurface RAFOS floats released during the period 2003–2005 that recorded once-daily temperature, pressure and acoustically determined position for two years, and by model-simulated 'e-floats' released in the subpolar DWBC. The evidence points to a few specific locations around the Grand Banks where LSW is most often injected into the interior. These results have implications for deep ocean ventilation and suggest that the interior subtropical gyre should not be ignored when considering the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

Triggered by a bunch of drifting ocean monitoring instruments, this new revelation represents a major paradigm shift in ocean circulation theory. Even more dramatic is the impact on current ocean circulation models, major components of the general circulation models (GCM) used to predict climate change. To understand how global climate changes in response to natural and human generated changes, it is essential to determine how quickly and by what pathways climate change signals are transported throughout the global ocean. Ocean currents not only redistribute surface warmth, the oceans themselves are a vast reservoir for heat and carbon dioxide, affecting both short term and long term climate change.
“Everybody always thought this deep flow operated like a conveyor belt, but what we are saying is that concept doesn't hold anymore,” said Duke oceanographer Susan Lozier. “So it's going to be more difficult to measure these climate change signals in the deep ocean.”

This has been a particularly disquieting week for the climate change establishment, with new discoveries regarding the importance of aerosols' impact on sea surface temperatures (SST) and cloud formation, and the halving of predicted sea-level increases due to ice sheet melting coupled with predictions of significant change in Earth's gravity field and rotational axis if Antarctica even partially melts. Add the news regarding the THC and one has to ask, how many revelations of erroneous assumptions are necessary before climate modelers admit that their computer programs are incapable of accurately predicting future climate change?

Climate skeptics are sometimes accused of selectively interpreting scientific data in order to bolster their case against anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The term used is “cherry picking.” When a theory makes certain predictions it is totally acceptable, even obligatory, to investigate those predictions. When a theory is based on certain fundamental assumptions regarding underlying science it is perfectly logical to question that theory when its underlying assumptions are shown to be in error. This is not cherry picking, it is how science works. It may discomfort those who complacently believe in the “consensus view” of AGW, but that is of no importance to science.

In this blog I have showcased a dozen or more scientific papers that end with a statement saying “the climate models need to take this into account,” or words to that effect. Time after time the theory of global warming and the models it rests on have been shown to be lacking. Sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large, fundamental ways (as is the case here) holes in the AGW theory keep appearing. The IPCC and the climate modeling crowd have constructed complex models of a chaotic system based on incomplete and erroneous assumptions—they have built a house of cards and asked us all to move in without checking the soundness of the foundation. Thankfully, anthropogenic global warming is dying the death of a thousand cuts—this is often the fate of flawed theories.
Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.

Global Warming Heat

This is a good as time as any to comment on the global warming debate. Recent days have seen some fairly hysterical mutual abuse between the two camps who have even gone so far as to associate themselves with the politics of the left and right.

I want you to think about what I just said. How can an issue of science have anything whatsoever to do with your political ideas? That a conservative senator chose to hire a staffer to locate sources that challenged the deluge of pro warming material that is at least as sloppy as any on the other side of the debate is still a necessary public service.

At least I know that the more egregious nonsense will be challenged as they should be.

The debate is now descending to the juvenile art of labeling.

What I must remind everyone is that we are living in a climatic era rightly named the Holocene. Our era has demonstrated a temperature range of variability of about two degrees. Over and over again we have warmed up to present conditions and sometimes a bit higher, before tumbling back as much as two degrees. This channel has been good for ten thousand years and there is no suggestion that it ever varied out of that range, including the little ice age.

I was hopeful that the present warm spell could be maintained as happened during the medieval warm period. It chose not to on the basis of the past twelve months. We have lost a degree as you may have well noticed.

All things been equal we have returned fully to lousy weather for decades. An equally fast advance in warming is an unprecedented climate event in terms of our knowledge, while a fast chilling such as we just experienced is not. In other words a quick recovery is out of the question while an additional drop is not.

Neither side has bothered to put the debate in the perspective of the Holocene which leaves nothing to debate at all.

I have argued ample reasons for the existence of the Holocene, but that is unimportant inasmuch as it clearly exists and is the subject of several earlier posts.

It appears that the Holocene exhibits natural governors that are able to keep the climate well channeled. We have just watched a forty year accumulation of heat be handily discharged into Arctic with minimal effect. I imagine if it got far too cold that the gulf stream would sharply strengthen or the Pacific would do something.

A year ago I was prepared to give the global warming hypothesis a chance. All the Earth had to do was maintain the temperature regime. It did not.

Noel Sheppard on Ice Age Prediction

This article outlines the arguments for the very reasonable expectation that the Earth is close to swinging back into a full blown ice age for another 100,000 years. For starters, our interpretation of the proxies confirm just such a repeating cycle. And if the past is a guide for the future, then the ice age should kick in soon.

In fact, this position is surely the uncontroversial one. I happen to disagree with this position but for reasons that will be controversial.

On the evidentiary front, the Holocene is locked into a two degree temperature spread that shows no sign of changing. No such evidence of such a narrow range appears to have existed in the previous interglacials. It is here that I would like to see a convincing review of the data. All indications that I have come across so far suggest a more likely temperature spread of several degrees and the maintenance of the ice sheets.

Yes, temperature points were achieved but I see no believable argument that the sea rose 300 feet.

They also spell out that CO2 levels peaked to present levels equivalent to that of past interglacials. This occurs as an 800 year lagging event after the temperature rises.

My principal objection to the restoration of an ice age in the north as we already have one in the south is that it is not possible to produce sea level ice outside 15 degrees south. It is equally unlikely to produce it very well up to several hundred feet above sea level. Most of the lands outside the mountains are lousy candidates for ice formation. What is more, with the exception of Greenland, all the lands including the Arctic Islands are effectively ice free.

In fact Greenland is unable to sustain an ice cap anywhere over ocean even over the North Pole. This is all because the Gulf Stream is way too powerful as a heat transfer machine.

For ice age conditions to return we must shut down the Gulf Stream. No more no less. At present, this could only happen if the sun reduced its output by a massive percentage. Yet water evaporation would also collapse depriving those ice fields of a supply of snow.

Thus we return to my core conjecture. The ice age ended permanently because the global crust was shifted 12900 years ago taking the northern ice cap thirty degrees south to the center of Hudson Bay. This took the Caribbean out of cooler temperate water into the tropics to produce the necessary hot water of the Gulf Stream.

This explanation also eliminates the many objections thrown at the very idea of an ice age from the very beginning and since conveniently forgotten.

The evidence is discussed more fully in my article ‘Pleistocene Nonconformity’ best seen on Viewzone.com

Global Warming Update: 'Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age'
By Noel Sheppard

January 11, 2009 - 11:57 ET

As Democrats and their president-elect -- with invaluable assistance from their media minions -- continue spreading climate hysteria in order to raise taxes and redistribute wealth, a possibly inconvenient truth has just been presented to the international community: "The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science."

Additionally, the entire bogus manmade global warming theory that climate alarmists and their surrogates have been forcing down the throats of the citizenry "is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change."

Such was reported by Russia's Pravda Sunday, and it not only goes quite counter to the junk science being espoused by folks like Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his accomplices James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, but it has also been regularly proffered by many of the real scientists and climatologists around the world that global warming loving media not only refuse to cite and/or interview, but also disgracefully ridicule as deniers and flat earthers.

According to Pravda, it is Gore, Hansen, Schmidt, and all their sycophant devotees that are the flat earthers who are distracting the world from a much more serious climate threat (emphasis added throughout):

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Sounds much like what the realist side has been saying for years, doesn't it? But it gets better:

During the 1970s the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory that ‘greenhouse gasses’ such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the theory of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) has gradually become accepted as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to prevent the worsening of AGW.

The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

Sounds exactly like what the realists claim, and have been claiming, correct? But there's more:

The reason that global CO2 levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated beverages loose [sic] their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment. We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent them from loosing their ‘fizz’, which is a feature of their carbonation, or CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earth’s temperature, we should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight hundred years after the end of the earth’s current Interglacial warm period. We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the world’s oceans.

The Vostok ice core data graph reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today.

The conclusion:

The AGW theory is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change. The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

For what it's worth, Accuweather's Joe Bastardi told Glenn Beck last Tuesday that Russia's Vladimir Putin may have cut supplies of gas from the Ukraine to Europe because he believes the globe is about to go into a cooling phase, and controlling natural gas will give his country a great deal of added power on that continent.

Maybe Putin was aware of this article about to be published by Pravda?

Regardless, it's going to be very interesting to see how much this report gets covered here in America where our media, regardless of how cold it is or how cold it might get, still believe Al Gore.

Stay tuned.

Post facto thought-provoker: the climate alarmists regularly proffer that America and the world, regardless of whether or not AGW theory becomes prophecy, should prepare for that possibility. Not doing so in their view would be foolish.

Well, what if the realists who believe we're entering another serious cooling phase are right? Wouldn't it be foolish for us not to prepare for that outcome?

After all, as most American residences and structures were built during the recent warming phase, they're not prepared for significantly colder temperatures. Neither is our current electricity grid or our supply of natural gas and heating oil.

Also, it is MUCH easier to deal with warmer temperatures than cooler ones. Maybe more important, a lot more people die from the cold than the heat.

As such, using the alarmist argument that it's foolish not to prepare for a possible outcome, and given the greater consequences involved in a global cooling, shouldn't we be allocating more resources and energy to preparing for it?

How might we accomplish this? Well, with the economy in a serious recession, and Congress considering a stimulus package, how about one that offers tax credits to individuals and businesses that upgrade their heating systems, improve insulation, and install double-pane windows?

Such purchases would not only prepare the nation for a possible cooling, but also fuel the economy and create jobs.

While we're at it, as we're going to need more heating oil, maybe we should fast-track the licensing of new refinery construction so that the inventory of such will be on the upswing thereby reducing the likelihood of price spikes from future supply constraints. Such construction would also create jobs.

Of course, if we are going to need more heating oil, we should remove the current impediments to exploration and drilling both offshore and in the nation's oil shale-rich interior.

Without question, if Pravda and the hundreds of climate realists predicting a cooling are right, America needs to prepare for it. Given the current state of our economy, proactive solutions should be looked at as sound investments in our nation's future with the ancillary benefit of much-needed job creation.

Or is this too logical for global warming-obsessed politicians and media?

IPCC Analysis Mathematically Flawed

You know folks; this article gives me and every other commentator a problem. I always found the IPCC position seriously suspect. This work shows that the work is not just suspect but surely manipulated by chaps lacking talent but determined to generate a result to conform to their thesis. I am not going to call it fraud but Enron has nothing on this nonsense.

The climate got warmer up to ten or so years ago. It may or may not be associated to more solar output. It has been cooling off slightly since. I surmise that the heat accumulation does not dissipate as quickly as we have assumed. I think it is first collected in the oceans and then slowly transferred into the atmosphere for transport into the north for eventual final disposition. It is a slow and imperceptible process. Recall that the North Pole has a conveyor that moves heat from the tropics in the form of the Gulf Stream and the atmosphere is inclined the same way.

Let me add another core assumption to this mix. The atmosphere is almost static over heat retention in the tropics. It is already maxed out and cannot pick up the slack generated by solar variation. Any surplus heat must be absorbed by water or reflected into space. The water or increased humidity must then be transported out of the tropics. This takes time. This is why heat is still washing into the Arctic from the previous decade and it still has not cooled down very much.

In fact, it is likely that the incoming solar energy is still much higher than the historic average although the recent abrupt drop if sustained at all could now change all this. Don’t you wish any of this was settled?
This article has shown the IPCC model to be rubbish.

As my readers know, I have been a strong advocate of the removal of CO2 from our waste streams. In fact my mandate for this Blog was to promote ways and means and we have gone a long way down that road successfully. The global warming linkage conjecture was controversial and is coming a cropper. It was never relevant to the core problem of managing our environment.

Disproof of Global Warming Hype Published

R. F. Gay / F. William Engdahl

A mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” has been published in debate on global warming in Physics and Society, a scientific publication of the 46,000-strong American Physical Society.

Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.

The article, entitled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes –

“… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chair (2004) of the New England Section of the American Physical Society (APS), has been studying climate-change science for four years.

He said:

“I was impressed by an hour-long academic lecture which criticized claims about ‘global warming’ and explained the implications of the physics of radiative transfer for climate change. I was pleased that the audience responded to the informative presentation with a prolonged, standing ovation. That is what happened when, at the invitation of the President of our University, Christopher Monckton lectured here in Hartford this spring. I am delighted that Physics and Society, an APS journal, has published his detailed paper refining and reporting his important and revealing results.

“To me the value of this paper lies in its dispassionate but ruthlessly clear exposition – or, rather, exposé – of the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity. The detailed arguments in this paper, and, indeed, in a large number of other scientific papers, point up extensive errors, including numerous projection errors of climate models, as well as misleading statements by the IPCC. Consequently, there are no rational grounds for believing either the IPCC or any other claims of dangerous anthropogenic ‘global warming’.”

Lord Monckton’s paper reveals that –

► The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
► CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
► Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
► The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
► The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
► “Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
► Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
► The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
► It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
► Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
► In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

Oceanic Heat Transfer

We know that the Ice age ended over 10,000 years ago and we know that it took around three thousand years for the ice to melt to current levels. I discuss the likely reasons for the ending of the Ice Age in my chapter Pleistocene Nonconformity posted earlier.

Amazingly, we also know that the Northern Hemisphere at least experienced a climate warmer than todays for the next 5000 years up to around 3000 years ago. In an earlier post, I posited that this was a reflection of the Antarctic cold water mass reaching its maximum extent.

We now live in a semi stable regime in which temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere attempt to converge on their Bronze Age highs, yet constrained by some mechanism that likely injects surplus cold water into the south Atlantic ultimately chilling the Gulf stream by a degree or two. An engine of this nature easily accounts for the little ice age and the known variations that have been experienced.

Currents are driven in the Atlantic around two Gyres which are induced by the Coriolis force. It is very much like the foot print of an eggbeater with the center flow feeding into the Caribbean. Rather obviously, a major increase of cold Antarctic surface water which is at least 5 degrees colder at the boundary contact even in the southern latitudes, would have a chilling effect on the equatorial waters that ultimately form the Gulf Stream.

At present, each year, the Atlantic equatorial zone receives a quantity of solar energy that we can conveniently name Q. This quantity does not vary. Q is eventually delivered, almost intact into the arctic and is discharged melting winter sea ice. The point that I want to make here is that there is no credible or significant mechanism in the Northern Hemisphere capable of altering this exchange. I question whether it can even be varied significantly by any force at work in the Northern Hemisphere.

Yet a little ice age must have been induced by a reduction in Q delivered to the Arctic. Barring extraordinary variation in Solar output which I think is rubbish, we have only one remaining choice. That is a sharp jump in the amount of cold water injected into the south Atlantic. The temperature differential is so large, that only a moderate shift in flow will be sufficient to achieve our ends.

And we do know that the surface waters around Antarctica can be pulsed by shifts in winds alone. Right now, unfortunately we have little knowledge of the workings of the exchange mechanisms between the South Polar current and the various currents interacting with it. However, learning how to measure the current flow rates of ocean currents (particularly the Benguela Current) is timely, and integrating that information into our models rather wise.

A simple change in the mix of source waters for the Benguela Current could have a huge multiplier effect on Equatorial surface temperatures. Scary thought!